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Troy Kirby

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Noir and reality of detective commercials

I've been a playing a lot of L.A. Noire on XBOX 360.

It holds a lot of the images that people collectively have of the late 1940s, especially the L.A. Noir which was developed in pulp magazines, books and film. James Ellroy holds the key to this revival. And the video game actually plays homage to the author and the crime by creating the entire game around the 1947 death of Elizabeth Short murder (The Black Dahlia).

Regardless of how the history actually played out, this is the type of image we hold dear.

Which leads me to a question: Are we portraying history in actual terms or how we wished it would have played out?

You see tough cops in fedoras, marching with a keen sidearm, a notebook and the idea that every case is solvable. Every ethnic group has specifics to them, especially the Irish captain and the way the squint of a detective's eyes hones in on the truth.

But we know now there were a lot of people railroaded from that era. Suspects confessed or had it beaten out of them. Evidence was tampered with, misread or never found. And assumptions were made. Clearance rates were as important, but less publicized, during that era. Investigative skills, interview tactics and other scientific measures were not as good as they are now.

Does this mean that they were in the dark ages in terms of detective work?

Hardly. This stuff goes on to this day. In some ways, the cops of the 1940s may have developed a case more now with the advancements of blood, semen and D.N.A.

Our scientific advancements may have helped us. But it may have made us lazy as a society. Anything has the possibility of being fakes, misread, tampered (purposefully or not), and it all comes down to a confession, sometimes, anyway.

The detectives of that era are romanticized since they dealt with a short-term decay. The idea that there was one crazy out there, in a world that was being rebuild after World War II with the hopes and dreams of a utopian society which never existed (and could never exist). Now, people expect their scandals. The rarity of someone fighting the system, exposing corruption, within the police force or city hall, has been removed.

Every other day is a scandal of sometime. Communication is rampant. The criminals know the tactics of a police investigation. It's difficult to use the tactics of the 1940s police work now, as those who are guilty now know what every investigator is looking for.

Noir detective stories also play into our suggestion that something can be solved within a few days, hours, minutes. There are always clues around. There are people who are suspects, who give themselves away if you ask the tough questions. The evidence always leads to someone.

That's the farce of criminal detective work in a fictional story.

Sometimes, nothing adds up. The bad guys do get away with it. Those who are suspects can be made to be guilty, confess even if they didn't do it, and the crime can be unsolved forever.

Zodiac (2007) is a perfect film about obsession, how an investigation can stall, have few answers even with a suspect or two, how leads can go dead, be garbage from the start, and how everything might be a MacGuffin.

One of my favorite examples of this is Homicide: Life on the Street (1995-00) which was a television series on NBC. The murder of Adena Watson, a case which haunts Det. Tim Bayliss throughout the series. Risley Tucker, the main suspect, was once in the interview room for 12-hours, but never truly confessed. He appeared guilty as hell, but there wasn't enough evidence for a D.A. Not only that, but Tucker dies in the fourth season. The case continues on, Bayliss keeps it back of his mind, and learns of a 1932 child murder similar to his which was never solved. That gives perspective that sometimes, evil does exist and does get away with it. To my knowledge, the series, nor the TV film afterward, ever solved the murder.

It's funny, but I think of Adena Watson sometimes. In terms of wondering what exactly happened. I was a fan of the show, and it stayed with me. I've read articles which said that NBC executives wanted the murder solved and the show producers kept delaying, saying that they would in a few episodes and never did on purpose. That's really police work, to continue on long after the leads are cold, the story is no longer fresh, and the idea that sometimes, the murderer stays free because there wasn't enough of those damn clues that any good detective pulp novel leaves behind in order to keep the reader's interest.

The Black Dahlia case had thousands of interviews. Hundreds of suspects. Fifty people confessed to the murder. The Black Dahlia prime suspect named in early 1980s was Jack Anderson Wilson, who was the prime suspect in the Cleveland Torso Murders in the mid-1940s. Wilson had never been a suspect until he was interviewed by a book author, John Gilmore, who wrote Severed. L.A.P.D. Detective John St. John told the newspapers that he was "closing in" on Wilson, who would die in an apartment fire in 1982.

The reason for expectations on The Black Dahlia case were the constant media sensation of the William Randolph Heart papers (trust me, they were worse than TruTv and make Nancy Grace look like a puppy). It was also the largest case since 1927.

All of these factors play into murder cases. And this is coming from a layman. I have no inside knowledge which would tell me otherwise. But still, sometimes we suggest how things were "different" back then. But that has more to do with the way we view history.

The younger we are, the less hardened we tend to be. And as we grow, we start to know more. Too much, in some sense.

I'm thirty-five and starting to think that the 1980s were an innocent time compared to now. But I have to catch myself. Because I used to hear how horrible the 1990s were by adults who remembered how cool the 1970s were. It's the 20-year itch. A lot of remembering the way we never were. Because fiction is a lot easier to deal with than the reality of the situation.

Ask those who expected The Black Dahlia murder to the be solved a week after it happened. Because if Sam Spade had been investigating it, the case would have been, right?

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